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From Jerusalem Notebooks:

Earplugs can’t suppress the sneakers squeaking around me— The skinny wrists of the meek, resigned Christ in his crown and robe— Are these demands to be fulfilled in a present calm. I appear serene but there’s a battle of resemblances within me. A blank melody quieting toward completion— Christ emerging from the tomb while cops are snoozing. That I got trashed and picked fights—that I went dancing among the local queers. I carry a strange distress enacting itself through these coordinates of forgetfulness along me. That my legs must be marked by the attempts to reach you, my tongue in its wager to meet you— Perhaps I am meant to have a few more years until fuller articulation of this—the hollows of my eyes trained toward the solitary wish to let me be unseen. They have brought inside all tables but mine. At 3am this kid tried to pimp out his younger brother to me. I decided—in the church on the spot where the tree was chosen—that a tattoo would last longer than the dust on my knees. The unlit chapel small as a closet—damaged mosaic floor and fresco of the corpse on a slab framed by tapestry— Praise withdrawn from men— Hungry, I climbed onto temptation and got bread crusts and candy from a basket. How many times have you tried to bury me— Decayed into an order where a gardener—who else could it be—wanders first this way, then that— I would like a fine suit for this ceremony, yet force is needed since otherwise I’ll run away.

A force that does not create affliction but reveals it—
An affection that does not create attachment but defers it—
A humility that does not create the wretched
but modifies them outgrowing toward infallible blood.

I split my lip speaking my way out of what I had wandered into. I steeped in that city with a pencil and persuasion to be unheroic. At times there was too much of the day remaining, at others too little. I haven’t gone anywhere as though I were tethered to the middle of the earth. I need to work this toward praise, yet the San Francisco Giants lost today so I don’t feel like it. Driven through the desert in an expensive cab—my knees pink islands floating within my black pant legs. Only when I’m flat on the pavement having wrecked my bicycle does human company make its persuasive appeal. My torso is so pale, the veins rise to its surface bright blue. My fingers are so long, I encircle the girth of your community. My eyes are so blue, I attract the suffocating seeking air. It’s by an intuition, or thread, thinner than a tone that I am tethered to this. The runnel of my spine crooked from this tussle across cities, and chattering of bonhomie and boys under eaves in skinny jeans who are stung by the bright arrows of their sensations. They are a chorus beginning—it is time I leave this café.